Slackware 11 Installation and USB Flash Drives
 

I experienced something which I found rather odd. A little background first.

When installing slackware I use my own set of customized tagfiles so that I can do the installation mostly unattended as far as choosing which packages are installed. I keep these tagfiles on a USB Flash Drive (thumb drive/pen drive..whatever you want to call them) and usually mount the drive under /floppy before the installation process.

Now on to the weirdness.

Normally I plug the usb flash drive into the box before booting. The kernel boots and /etc/rc.d/rc.usb executes and normally it displays information about the thumb drive while it is "Probing for USB controllers" . In slackware 10.2 and previous version it would display some information about the flash drive and then create the appropriate device for it under /dev

When doing the same during a slackware 11 installation, no information was displayed about the flash drive during the "Probing" portion of rc.usb and the device wasn't created under /dev (in my case it should have been /dev/sdc1)

I ran lsmod to make sure the appropriate modules were installed and the various modules required for usb storage devices were loaded properly. So the kernel was seeing the flash drive properly.

The Work-Around

So after scanning through /etc/rc.d/rc.S I noticed a reference to /dev/makedevs.sh which is executed to create the detected partitions. Figuring it wouldn't hurt I executed the script again and this time it created /dev/sdc and /dev/sdc1

So even though in the past information would be displayed about your usb storage device during rc.usb, the kernel is still detecting the device and all you need to do is execute /dev/makedevs a second time. I have tried it with a variety of different usb flash drives and got the same results. The probably may also occur if you connect a usb harddrive during installation.

If anyone else has experienced this, please let me know because I hope it's just not an isolated incident.

I don't have a /etc/rc.d/rc.usb file on my machine. I believe that if you're running a 2.6 series kernel, rc.udev will probe your USB devices. Under a 2.4 series kernel, hotplug does it.
Again, this is a function of udev if you're running 2.6. The 2.4 series kernels don't allow for a dynamic /dev directory (unless you use devfs) and so they rely on the static /dev entries which are still installed by default.
There were some issues with USB devices in the rc5 kernels. It is possible that you're not using a Slackware-11.0 final iso. This issue was fixed mere days before the final release.
That script wouldn't be available on a machine running udev. Are you using a 2.6 kernel or a 2.4 kernel?

This issue is with booting off the DVD. When I'm talking about this, I'm referring to installation environment, not an installed environment. /dev/rc.usb exists in the ram disk file system contains all the scripts used during installation. I guess the official name of this ram file system is /rootdisk/color.gz which is loaded into ram for the slackware installation

And I'm using the official slackware 11.0 dvd and booting up using sata.i kernel.

Try huge26.s.